Be Careful for what you wish for

You provided bad "evidence," which is worse than no evidence at all.

Everything I think about this stems from a two premises:

- The primary advantage MMOs have over other games is the playerbase, ie: socialization.

- Introducing changes to how people interact will have an effect on that playerbase, bad or good, large or small.

If you don't, or can't, follow either of those, then we have nothing to talk about.

If you give people a way to bum rush all the content almost immediately and do it without talking to a single person, you've removed the primary reason for that player to continue playing an MMO.

You've also unintentionally highlighted the worst aspect of the game. Anyone with half a brain realizes the gear grind has no depth and isn't fun, except now it also serves no purpose.

Why did people want the next tier gear? Two reasons: for status (ie epeen, to show off to their friends) or peer pressure (to be more effective in your raid role, and not let your group down).

If you can effectively solo all endgame content, status means nothing, obviously, and there is no peer pressure, because next Tuesday night, nobody is going to care whether or not you show up in LFR.

WoW's subscriptions began declining around the the time LFG was introduced, and outside a small bump at the release of Cata, they continue to decline.

I don't think that's unrelated. The content had to be made easier for LFG to function at all. S in addition to the other issues, you've also minimized the existing marginal challenge.

Without other players, a need for guilds and friends lists, there's little draw for these kinds of games.

Please define 'bad' evidence. It was further proof to the fact that declining numbers are more due to lack of interesting content than an LFD tool that was introduced about two years ago. It wasn't until the following year that subscriptions began to take a huge dip.
Oh yeah I can provide evidence for that as well.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/3064...all-transcript

I am still waiting on you providing any evidence at all to back up your opinons though.

Also there will always be a need for guilds. There are still guilds in other MMOs with an LFD tool.

In case you missed it, wow had the lfg tool added in the ICC patch.
A patch that lasted 1 year, 1 year of the same content. Yet wow maintained its sub numbers during that period. Clearly lfd tool made wow lose numbers.

QFT

Now we have too many servers.

don't play on a ghost server then DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Yes, don't add LFG tools and let us sit at fleet for hours, yelling in general for that tank or healer we need. I mean, it's so much fun, we all love it.

I did and it was fine, the solo content is great and pushing myself to solo two man content is also fun.
Group content is really fun with a few friends, try to recruit them into the game.

Can you? If you're stubborn, proactive and have a healthy friends list &/or guild members. However, you're simply being contrarian if you're denying there's a massive issue.

You mention soloing twice within your justification/defense and, personally speaking, if I wanted to focus on soloing I'd be a single player game.

Like the person you quoted, I was unequivocally against an LFG tool pre-launch but it's of my opinion there's a great need for it now. Ideally, same server but that's if I'm being picky.

/facepalm

Yes because level 50 content has so much soloable content. There's well... datacrons and um... some dailies on Belsavis and Ilum. Not ALL of them mind you since there's a few heroic 2/4s that are quite hard for fresh 50s to solo and all.

I'll keep this short and sweet. If I can't get a group to do some FPs, I'm not going to be playing long. I don't need a 'community' in game, I just want to have a semi-positive interaction with other players for 30 minutes at a time, corss-server LFG would let me do that. Right now this is impossible because I have to spend >15m usually to find even two damn people to fill out a group that already is me and RL friend of mine.